Xbox -> Hardware Upgrades -> Hard Drive:

The stock hard drive is only 8 or 10 gigs, so a common desire is to upgrade to provide additional storage. This is complicated by the fact that the retail bios requires the hard drive to be locked to the motherboard. Because of this, an Xbox needs to be hacked in some way at least temporarily so a new drive can be installed.

• Unlocking: An Xbox drive needs to be unlocked from the motherboard it is locked to before it can be used in another Xbox or in a PC. This cannot be done without using some form of a hack, such as a modchip or softmod. If you have a Xenium or X3 modchip installed, they will unlock/lock the drive for you with their internal menu. There are also several applications that can be run on a hacked Xbox that will unlock/lock the drive easily, such as ConfigMagic, Evox, and UnleashX.

• Locking: Any hard drive installed into an Xbox needs to be locked before it will boot with the retail bios, or before you attempt to use that Xbox on XboxLive (which requires the retail bios). As long as the Xbox continues to boot a hacked bios the drive does not need to be locked. I do not recommend locking the drive unless you plan to use XboxLive, as there is a risk of getting stuck with a locked drive if the motherboard ever fails. The same methods described above work for locking as well as unlocking.

• Partitions: The drive partitions are defined in the bios, and therefore cannot be modified without editing the bios.

• Corrupt Partitions:

There is a limit of how many files you can put onto a partition because the Xbox uses the FatX file allocation table. A file allocation table is a list of every file on the drive and its storage location, and FatX limits a partition to 4096 files and/or directories per directory. I normally recommend using drives under 350gig to prevent crossing this limit, but you can use larger if you are careful with how you fill it. A partition will get corrupted if there are too many files to store and the file table starts overwriting itself. To prevent this from happening to the G partition on a drive over 350gig, you should try to put most of your games and roms onto the F partition, as those have many files per gig. You can put some games onto G, but if you stuff the rest of it with dvdrips or video content you can use the space without crashing the file table.

• Tools to assist with upgrading a hard drive:
  • AutoInstallers
  • XboxHDM